Leaderboard Zone

Reading over my picks from the past week, I noticed a strong theme – we’re using more and more apps, creating more and more data, but we’re not seeing the true value we might from connecting all the dots. Sure, the NSA is – and Facebook, Google, and other large platforms are as well. But imagine what happens when *we* get those insights?! A move from the center (big platforms) to the node (us) of the information ecosystem seems imminent…

Nearly three hours a day on our mobile phones (and we’re not talking). Most of that time we’re in “AppWorld” – not on “the open web.” That is a scary trend, to my mind. But I think it’s temporary. Or rather, I hope it is.

Turns out, as a service, you have to provide what people want. For the most part. Facebook is considering the impact of apps like SnapChat and Secret. Clearly, it’s not what the social networking giant *wants* – but perhaps this is a worm turning.

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The week was dominated by Google related stories, but the top dialog had to do with the Internet itself. I’m sensing something of a shift in society’s beliefs about the Internet’s central role in our humanity. Five years ago, no one wanted to talk about Internet access as a basic human right. In 2012, the UN called it exactly that. With access consolidating into what looks like a natural monopoly, might regulation as a utility be far behind?

Real Time (Medium) Another, denser version of previous essays asking whether it isn’t time to call the Internet a basic utility. “..the immaterial organisation of the internet has now become the most dominant force on this side of the planet...” Unfortunately, this piece is too dense. Try this one instead: The Internet Is Fucked (TechCrunch) in which the author enjoins: “Go ahead, say it out loud. The internet is a utility.There, you’ve just skipped past a quarter century of regulatory corruption and lawsuits that still rage to this day and arrived directly at the obvious conclusion.” Of course, that created a rejoinder: More? – “The Internet is an incredibly useful tool in modern society, but it isn’t essential to the basic functioning of society. Utilities are.” My take: The Internet is a basic need now for the info-organism we are all becoming. So I’m leaning toward the utility camp, I’m afraid. There’s a new book on the subject, should you be interested.

The Monuments of Tech (NYTimes.com) A meditation, with far too photos, on the meaning of the campuses built by Google, Twitter, Apple, Facebook. Have you read The Circle yet? Read The Circle. Then read this.

Welcome to Googletown (The Verge) As long as we’re talking tech monuments, here’s a full blown deep dive into the relationship between Google and its Silicon Valley home, Mountain View. As one might expect, it’s fraught. But I’ve spent time in Mountain View before Google got there. Not that much has changed, outwardly. If Google keeps growing the way it’s planning to grow, that won’t be the case.

When quantified-self apps leave you with more questions than answers (The Daily Dot ) Something of a takedown on admittedly kludgy first generation self trackers. “I tweet a lot, but it’s mostly nonsense. I don’t have a whole lot of use for “data” about myself.” I just started using the Nike Fuelband. I’ll post plenty about that I’m sure, as the first week has proven interesting.

Can Privacy Be Saved? (The New York Review of Books) Don’t you love articles that ask questions, then fail to answer them? Me too. This is a review of various government reports and Presidential speeches arising from the Snowden revelations. The essay makes a strong case for – making a stronger case for privacy. It ends by citing Orwell, Dick, and Bradbury. It does not answer the question – which may well be the answer after all.

Every year around this time I do two things: First I look back at my predictions from a year ago and grade myself, then I get around to making a new set of predictions. These are often my most popular posts of the year, proving the old magazine saw that the world loves a list. So who am I to buck the trend? Let’s get cracking on seeing how my crystal ball turned out, shall we?

As you can see from my 2012 predictions roundup, I took something of a new approach to the prognostication game last year. Instead of one lengthy post with all my predictions, I actually broke them into a series of posts, seven in all. I went into detail on why I thought each forecast would prove correct (save the last one, which was a series of “shoot from the hip” predictions.)

I’ll be as brief as I can with this review – this marks the ninth time I’ve done it. Overall, I’ve had a pretty good run of it. I hope 2013 keeps pace.

I think it is fair to say this one came true in spades. Twitter is a major force in media now, a statement that could not be said just one short year ago. As I wrote in my essay: “Twitter is an engineering-driven company, but its future rests in its ability to harness the attention of its consumers, then resell that attention to marketers.” Pretty much every major move Twitter made this past year was about securing its media-based business model. Twitter consolidated its control over its distribution, introduced “Twitter Cards” to keep readers engaged on its own platform, refined it’s increasingly addictive “Discover” media feature, introduced a broader and deeper set of engagement-based advertising products, and much more. Twitter is now seen as an essential partner for every major media company in the world – the hash tag is now a television and movie marketing essential. (Oh, and I predicted that there’d be conflict with Flipboard’s CEO being on Twitter’s board. He’s not anymore.)

The second part of my prediction: That Twitter is the only “free radical of scale” in the Internet ecosystem is also true. No other company boasts Twitter’s scale, importance, and independence. I think it’s arguable that Yahoo might come back from the near dead to claim a similar status, but I doubt it. More on this as I review my second prediction below. Meanwhile, I put this prediction in the “got it right” side of the ledger.

Well…not so much. If ever I could be blamed for predicting what I personally wished would become the truth, this is it. I deeply believe that the Internet needs a distribution and application platform that is independent of business model bias (IE, Facebook has a bias toward leveraging its social graph business, Google has a Search bias, Microsoft a Windows bias, etc). I saw – and still see – Twitter as potentially that kind of a business. But the company didn’t do too much to prove my point in 2012. In fact, one could argue it went in exactly the opposite direction, though I don’t fall into the same camp as many of Twitter’s most strident detractors.

Most of Twitter’s moves – cutting off developers who create Twitter interface clients, for example – are a result of the company consolidating its core business model of serving advertisers (and, arguably, end users) a consistent, reportable experience. Other big news-creating moves – like cutting off LinkedIn and Instagram – were decisions calculated based on value exchange – Twitter felt that the companies using Twitter’s resources were getting more from Twitter than the Twitter ecosystem was getting back. I don’t find such moves to be inconsistent with my prediction on their face. I think the jury is out as to whether Twitter can find a Swiss-like position in the Internet ecosystem. The big question is whether it can quantify what “value” is for a developer, so developers can build on Twitter’s platform without worrying about shifting sands. And the big guys who have rejected Twitter as a competitor – Google with Google+, and Facebook of course – will most likely have to come around to a position that at the worst views Twitter as a real force that needs to be integrated in some way with their core products. In the long run, “co-opetition” is a proven strategy in the business world.

Meanwhile, I do find Twitter’s core DNA and philosophy to be far more “Googley” than any other major Internet company. The management team believes in transparency and openness as their True North, and I wager this philosophy will be both challenged and proven in 2013.

Overall, I’d say this prediction was about half right. A push, neither right nor wrong.

Now, one could argue this did not happen in 2012. But I’m going to say it has – in 2012 Facebook made several moves that changed the web-wide business of advertising significantly. First, it tested off-site advertising with Zynga. Next, it launched a game-changing programmatic ad exchange, FBX. While this network only allows access to Facebook’s domain-specific inventory, it’s a massive injection of liquidity into the overall Internet advertising landscape, and laid the groundwork for an Adsense like play across the rest of the web. What I got wrong was that instead of starting with the HTML web, Facebook started instead in the very place it was seen as weak, on the mobile web. Regardless, this mobile network is in fact a “web-wide competitor to AdSense,” if you take the web to include mobile, which I certainly do.

So I’ll score this prediction in the “got it right” camp, even if the final shoe – a PC web network – has yet to drop. It will.

In my essay on this topic, I predicted that Google will fumble either Google TV, Motorola, or Google+ in 2012, and then reasoned that the real story would be how the company bounced back once the fumble occurred. This prediction came true – Google blew its integration of Google+ into search earlier this year, but has slowly and surely corrected the blunder. Since then, the company has navigated any number of major issues – multiple government probes, integration of Motorola, bringing the Android beast to heel – quite admirably.

I think this one goes comfortably into the “got it right” category, but I’ll admit I didn’t predict how strongly the company would rebound from its initial missteps.

Well, sort of. We did have the big Instagram deal, and tons of “acqui-hires”, but the year didn’t turn out as I predicted in terms of major ad-tech deals. We all thought Yahoo was going to become a buyer again, but that didn’t pan out, thanks to the CEO turnover there. On the plus side, data from Thomson Reuters does show 2012 as a very big year for exits – one of the biggest in recent history – but much of that was due to the Facebook IPO.

Overall, I’d say I missed this one, even if I do look smart for calling out Instagram in my original post.

It’s very difficult to score this one, because it’s so much about cultural zeitgeist. What is the role of “the corporation” in our world, both personal and social? If nothing else, 2012 was a year where we began to ask this question in earnest. It’s the year that “the 1%” and the “99%” became cultural talking points, where we debated the role of government in moderating the profits of the few over the well being of the many, and where that debate ran all the way to last night – when the fiscal cliff was averted, in the main, by kicking this question down the road a few more months.

I think I overestimated the speed with which we will take up this question in our society. When we look back with the lens of time and history, I think it’ll be clear that the role of the corporation was a central issue of the early 2000s. But to call it in one year was premature.

- Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.

Well, this one happened. Score one in the “got it right” column.

- Both Apple and Amazon will make billion-dollar acquisitions. More interestingly, so will Facebook.

Facebook checked the box with Instagram, which was really a bit below the billion dollar mark, thanks to the IPO not quite working out as expected. Apple did not take my prediction to heart, though it did buy AuthenTec for about $350 million, and speculation about its Next Big Move continue. Amazon nearly hit the billion dollar mark with its acquisition of Kiva Systems, but that deal wasn’t the one I was expecting.

So, call this one a mostly miss, which to be fair, means it was a miss….

- Android will be brought to heel by Google, eliciting both massive complaints and cheers, depending on where you sit.

I think this is happening. I can’t go into massive detail, but I think the latest version of Android is very good (I am now a user), and the Play store is For Real. I’d score this a “got it right.” I’m sure some of you may disagree, though. I’d like to hear why.

Oops. I clearly should have done my homework first. IDC predicts that double digit smartphone market share will happen for Windows in 2016. Last year, the company had about 2.6%. However, that number is higher in international markets. But I can’t claim a win based on double digit penetration in Spain. So, this one is a miss.

– Microsoft Xbox will integrate meaningfully with the web (Kinect is key), and start to compete in social across the digital spectrum

An ecosystem is developing, but this is simply not there yet. I’m not sure if it ever will. Another miss. I clearly need to stop making predictions about Microsoft.

- IBM will emerge as a key player in the consumer Internet.

Nope. I’m not even going to pretend this happened, though I bet I was simply too early here. I may revisit this once IBM makes a move (if it ever does!). Another miss.

– China will be caught spying on US corporations, especially tech and commodity companies. Somewhat oddly, no one will (seem to) care.

It’s happening, (more and more), but we haven’t yet had the spectacular news (like the Google hack last year) that gets folks all excited (so they then can ignore it). Instead, it seems we just see it as business as usual. I think this is a mild “got it right” – but upon reflection, it wasn’t so hard to predict in the first place.

- A heads up display for the web will launch that actually is worth using, but most likely in limited use cases.

So that’s it. In review, I made 14 predictions. By my score, I got 7 right, 5 wrong or mostly wrong, and 2 were a push.

But to be fair, four of my “wrong” predictions were in the “shoot from the hip” category. I think I’ll drop that for 2013 and focus on the ones where I put in serious thought. For those six predictions, my score was better: 3 right, two pushes, and one miss (on the M&A front).

I fell out of the habit, but here are the Signals from last week. If you want to get my daily roundup of stories worth paying attention to, get the RSS here, or sign up in email at the top right of the page here.

After a 22-year career helming communications and later all of central marketing for Microsoft – she counts her budgets with a “b”, folks – Mich Matthews, who I admit I’ve grown fond of, is leaving Microsoft later this summer.

For years I’ve asked Mich to sit down with me and endure one of my trademark grillings, and for years she’s demurred, in the main because she believes that the CMO should not be a front person. “You’re an onstage guy,” she told me when we last spoke. “I’m the person pulling the ropes backstage.”

Well, maybe because she’s leaving, and maybe because she’s exploring what comes next (she honestly doesn’t know, but has an inkling), Mich has finally agreed to speak her mind on stage, and if our prep conversation earlier this week was any indication, it’s going to be one hell of a swan song.

Mich opens Day Two of the sixth annual CM Summit in NY just 10 short days from now. And she’ll have some serious stories to tell.

For example, it was Mich in the wings as her boss Bill Gates arrogantly defied the US Justice Department in a disastrous videotaped antitrust deposition in the late 1990s. Not very many people saw that video – but imagine, as Mich certainly has, if that video had gone viral on YouTube. “Thank God YouTube didn’t exist,” Mich told me. Today’s leaders in key areas – search and social, for example – are headed for equally fateful outcomes if they don’t heed the lessons of how the USS Microsoft foundered on the shoals of government policy.

Mich, who in private has always been extraordinarily candid, is ready for her next chapter. When I asked how she felt, she told me “Like I just got a degree in awesome from the University of Awesomeness.” It’s not that working at Microsoft was terrible, but rather that after putting in more than two decades, she had earned the right to look at the world from a new perspective.

It will be that point of view I”ll be asking about first, and then we’ll get into some history, as well as some prognostications about the industry in general. Lest we forget, this is the woman responsible for taking Bing and marketing it to a more than 100% share increase in less than two years. The person responsible for fighting off Google in office apps, Apple in mobile, Sony and Nintendo in gaming, Oracle and scores of others in Enterprise, and, and, and…She’s got war stories, and she’s got lessons learned.

In fact, I’m thinking about giving her opening session more time, as I know we’ll run out of it too soon.